In Gunnar Olsson’s magisterial, resourceful, lucid and breathtaking Abysmal: A Critique of Cartographic Reason (2007), the map glimmers and shines at the centre of human culture, as a tool and toil of the human imagination, as a key modality of human discourse, and as an instrument of knowledge and of power. Invoking Shakespeare’s poet in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who ‘gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name’, Olsson outlines the pivotal elements of cartographic practices, the very tasks of maps: naming and locating.1 To offer proper names and spatial characterisation. And, thus, to articulate and link

Footnotes

Gunnar Olsson, Abysmal: A Critique of Cartographic Reason, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007, p.116. See also pp.87–91, 115–21.
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The website of Hans Ragnar Mathisen, http://www.keviselie-hansragnarmathisen.net, is extensive and informative (last accessed on 20 July 2017).
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Following the new orthography for the North Sami language acceded in 1978, Sápmi is the term used to signify the land of the Sami people.
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See Denis Wood, The Power of Maps, New York: The Guilford Press, pp.58–60. See also http://www. petersmap.com/ (last accessed on 17 July 2017); and Mark Monmonier, Rhumb Lines and Map Wars:
A Social History of the Mercator Projection, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
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See the back cover of Hammond Compact Peters World Atlas, Union, NJ: Hammond World Atlas
Corporation, 2002.
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The Peters projection is also a cylindrical projection, but centered on the 45th meridian.
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Kjerstin Uhre, ‘Sápmi and the Fennoscandian Shield: On and Off the Map’, Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings, vol.15, no.2, pp.81–92.
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For commentary and visuals, see Kuratorisk Aktion (ed.), TUPILAKOSAURUS: An Incomplete(able) Survey of Pia Arke’s Artistic Work and Research, Kuratorisk Aktion: Copenhagen, 2012, pp.134–37, 147–51 and 275, as well as essays by Carsten Juhl and Stefan Jonsson in the present issue of Afterall.
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